Birdeye Raises $60M Series C, Eyes Expansion

Customer-experience platform Birdeye announced this week that it has secured a $60 million Series C round led by Accel-KKR. This brings Birdeye’s lifetime funding total to $93 million.

Birdeye plans to use the funds to further build out its product. Its goal is to become a comprehensive platform for local businesses, based on the assumption that local businesses prefer a single platform to a loose collection of point solutions.

The company will use some of the proceeds to support its planned expansion into the UK and Australia.

“We all expect the convenience of a digital-first experience, and that has accelerated during the pandemic. Still, local businesses have been unable to transition to digital,” said Birdeye CEO Naveen Gupta.

“We want to help local businesses join the digital revolution without the hassle of complicated and costly software. We want to allow local businesses to compete and win with larger organizations. With this investment from Accel-KKR, we will make this a global movement.”

Birdeye currently serves 80,000 local businesses. The platform focuses on helping SMBs deliver a quality experience at every touchpoint with a customer. For example, Birdeye users can automatically request reviews from customers, handle customer queries in real-time, request payments via text, and so on.

Payments are the most recent addition to the platform. The company added Birdeye Payments last year. Thus movefilled an obvious gap in the customer experience platform.

“Payments is no longer fintech,” Naveen Gupta said last year. “It is part of the customer journey.”

Big Opportunity in CX

This round’s lead investor also sees big opportunities ahead in delivering a comprehensive customer experience solution for local businesses.

“Birdeye has successfully identified the high value of customer experiences and is delivering a powerful facilitating element for local businesses,” said Joe Porten, Managing Director of Accel-KKR. “We see incredible opportunity within this rapidly evolving space as the importance of peer validation grows in relation to expanded user communities on social networks and other digital channels.”

Birdeye was founded in 2012 by Naveen and Neeraj Gupta. Birdeye raised two previous venture rounds since its founding. In January 2016, it raised n $8 million Series A led by Trinity Ventures. And in February 2017 the company raised a $25 million Series B led by AME Cloud Ventures.

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